Quick Cuts

By J. C.

THE INHERITOR. Bart Cordell (Jean Paul Belmondo), only son of a wealthy industrialist, suspects foul play in his father's recent death. He enlists the aid of a private detective, plus journalists on his father's newsmagazine and his own executive lackeys to get to the roots of the problem. The roots, not surprisingly, are rotten with corruption, and lead to an international consortium headed by an Italian businessman who had something nefarious to do with the Jews in Rome during the second World War.

The movie is furiously paced, and Director Philippe Labro hypes the action by doing a lot of crosscutting. No scene seems to last longer than a minute, and Labro whisks the viewer backward, forward and sideways in time. The result gets a great deal of razzle going but stays short on dazzle. All the momentum established is artificial and constantly stalls out into spurious suspense. There are some nice incidental observations about the eccentricities of the rich--Cordell has his face imprinted on his personal checks and sleeps with a sort of large, mystic stone under his pillow--but watching The Inheritor gives a general feeling of false movements, like getting jostled in a crowd.

ENGLAND MADE ME is extracted--painfully--from a 1935 Graham Greene novel about moral and political decadence in Germany before World War II. The excellent Peter Finch appears as a brassbound industrialist named Krogh who traffics with the Nazis to sustain and increase his fortune. Michael York, who apparently wandered in from Cabaret still wearing his costume, impersonates the brother of Krogh's mistress (Hildegard Neil). There is much solemn and oblique conversation about impending crises, and the feeling prevails that the director, Peter Duffell, was rather too impressed with The Damned. There is, however, a splendid supporting performance by Michael Hordern as a quintessentially seedy journalist. If only the movie as a whole were as echt Greene as Hordern's characterization.

THE TRIPLE ECHO finds Glenda Jackson waiting out World War II on a tumbledown farm deep in the English countryside. Her husband is a P.O.W. in Japan, so she takes a lover, a young soldier (Brian Deacon) who so enjoys her company and so dislikes the army that he deserts. To explain his presence to the curious townspeople, and to thwart suspicion in general, Jackson dresses her lover up as her sister and has him doing the chores in drag. He resists at first, but then comes to like it a little, enough to accept a Christmas-dance date with a loudmouthed sergeant (Oliver Reed).

If novelty were enough to sustain a movie, The Triple Echo could go far. But novelty is about all it has. Director MIchael Apted is so concerned with making the oddness of the script believable that he never really takes advantage of it. The movie is never weird or funny enough, never frightening or suspenseful. It does not seem especially outlandish either, which is another mistake. Even kinkiness is academic here. Glenda Jackson seems impatient, while Oliver Reed goes about with his cheeks puffed out, as if taking a sobriety test with an imaginary balloon.

qed J. C.

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